Sunday, August 25, 2013

Lesson 9: Piping Like It's 1999

Today we had a nice little session. We used ls to list all the files again. This time she remembered that cat is the program we use for printing out a file. So we printed out the weekdays in the vkp file. Then she manually counted that there are 7 of them. I persuaded her to see if the computer comes to the same conclusion as she did. So I introduced the new tool wc (word count) the name of which was found very funny. We found out that the "-w" flag should be used. Then we did our first "double pipe": cat vkp|wc -w|sayThis time she also remembered how to type the pipe character. The computer agreed with her and said "seven".Then we googled for "monsters" as per her request, and saved a picture of a monster onto the hard disc, found it there using ls and opened it in vim to find out that it looked like garbage. She liked it a lot though. She remembered how to type vim and how to exit. Nice.